panos

@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org @cochise@comuna.social.br thank you both for the kind and supportive words, means a lot! Chris, you know I'd always love to have you more active in the project and get your feedback, I know you have a lot to offer. I also know that how things turned out with Firefish was pretty disappointing. Catodon is my attempt to make it right this time, and I'm very happy with how it's evolving!

Today is the first day of the sex positive gathering I am attending in Berlin and I'm beyond excited! Sadly, this means I will have very little time (if any) for Catodon development. Please be a little patient, next week I am returning to Greece and will resume work for the next stable release (end of August or beginning of September). Some good stuff is on the way!
#catodon

@AntoineD@kwak.cab took me 10 hours (working on other stuff in parallel) but the peertube issue should be fixed - please confirm!

@AntoineD@kwak.cab @catodon oh and also you can search your bookmarks

What would you like to see in a "Media" timeline?

I am adding an Instagram-inspired Media timeline, based on Home (Following), and I'm wondering what would people want from something like that. For example, should it include only photos and videos, or audio files too? And anything else I might be missing (never used Instagram tbh). Thanks!
#catodon

(and I said "initial work" because I haven't tested it on a live instance, it will probably need corrections - if anyone wants to test and provide feedback lmk)

Found some time earlier than expected, so here are the basic differences of my fork:

- It makes each federated category/tag behave much more like a real Lemmy community (Group actor), including its moderators, featured posts, follower rules, and shared inbox.
- A Discourse topic can be sent as a Lemmy-compatible Page (with replies as Notes), rather than only the formats upstream offers.
- Votes federate: remote upvotes/downvotes become Discourse likes, and the federated score is shown on posts.
- Moderation federates in both directions: removals, bans, locks, moderator changes, reports, and featured/pinned posts can be communicated to compatible remote communities.
- Discourse users become proper, followable ActivityPub people. Mentions are also resolved for federation.
- It can follow a remote community—for example on Lemmy or NodeBB—and present it inside Discourse as a local “shadow category.” Local users can then read and participate from Discourse.
- It adds an instance-level actor and optional “authorized fetch,” which can require signed ActivityPub requests when other servers retrieve content.
- Administrators get extra tools: community/federation health view, remote-community management, per-community ban management, URL/content resolution, and bulk republishing/backfill.

Catodon now has built-in bot protection by default

We had some complaints about hCaptcha recently on catodon.rocks, and I didn't like the fact that you have to rely on other services and that the default Bot protection ("None") is "Not recommended" anyway, so I integrated ALTCHA in Catodon, which will be the default on new servers - no further action needed. Also added rate limiting to signups for extra protection.

#catodon #sharkey

@lnkr@staging3.plamenu.com seems to be company owned, which is not ideal to me, I like Codeberg's collective approach. But I will give it some thought, it doesn't look like a bad alternative apart from that, and it's forgejo... maybe , maybe. @TamsynUlthara

Catodon is now up to date with Sharkey's develop

Catodon was supposed to be based on Sharkey's stable branch, but since Sharkey hasn't had a new non-security release for around a year (latest stable is based on Misskey from April 2025), I went through the commits that have been made on develop since then, and merged the ones that apply to Catodon, or adapted them wherever needed. Some bug fixes were already fixed independently on Catodon, but there were a lot of upstream fixes and performance improvements that I merged (mostly the amazing work Hazelnoot has done on Sharkey), resulting in over 100 new commits.

So, Catodon's next stable version, 26.8.0, will be up to date with Sharkey's latest develop where it matters/applies. If Sharkey stays stagnant, I might start merging commits directly from Misskey, but I'll give it some time, hopefully Sharkey gets back on its feet soon 🙏

#catodon #sharkey

I totally respect Codeberg's decision to disallow projects with mostly AI-generated code - we should all be doing things the way we want, especially in open source. I am very thankful to Codeberg for hosting us until now, and I want to avoid github like the plague, so I will most probably set up a forgejo instance for Catodon (and a couple of other projects) in the coming days. Hopefully, this should also give our repo better uptime.

Custom timelines and Mastodon-compatible quotes deployed on catodon.rocks

You can now test both features =)
To demonstrate custom timelines, I have added !catodon-talks as a separate timeline for all users - you can add Custom feeds, Lists, RSS feeds and forums as timelines, and set any timeline as Home!

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#catodon